Despondent

Hold on Hope
36″ x 48″
Acrylic on wood panel
2020

Despondent: Judith Hochman, Kum-ja Lee,
M. V. Moran, Alanna Risse, Rhonda Vanover,
Amanda Martin Wilcox at Maude Kerns Art Center

Opening Reception:
Friday, February 21, 6 – 8pm

Exhibit Dates:
February 21 – March 20, 2020

Maude Kerns Art Center, Eugene, Oregon

Artist Statement

This work is a self reflection on how — with the help of the internet and a social media addiction — I managed to break my own heart. It’s an attempt at making tangible things that are never really tangible, but I want to believe they are. As humans, we are so good at filling in the gaps, at taking an abstraction and filling in details that are spawned completely from our own imagination. I am so good at filling in gaps, sometimes to my own detriment.

I’ve gathered creative common licensed photographs off the internet of the deep ocean, of places I have never been. And yet I have, for years, had a fascination with deep sea exploration and my dreams frequently take place on the ocean’s surface, with no shore in site.

In “real life” the closest I can get to actually experiencing the deep sea are pixelated images taken from internet strangers of places unknown to me. I gather these images, crop them to suit my needs, carefully trace the digital map that makes up their pixels and colors, and then set out to do my best as a painter to conjure up some sort of tangibility in them. I suppose I am taking one abstraction and making another one out of it in the hopes of making something I can understand on my own terms. Not the real thing by any stretch of the imagination, but some sort of real thing that can never be more than a painting.

Although…. remember when the painting came to live in the movie Xanadu??? It could happen.

This painting and four more like it, will be on display at the Maude Kerns Art Center in Eugene Oregon from February 21st to March 21st, 2020. It is part of a group show featuring the works of M.V. Moran, Rhonda Vanover, Judith Hochman, Amanda Wilcox, and Kumja Lee.